Perfume is a story of a murderer. As the main title suggests, smell plays a large role in the book, driving the protagonists twisted actions. Born without any odour himself, Grenouille Jean-Baptiste is gifted with an incredibly precise sense of smell and ostensibly no moral compass. The novel follows Grenouille's life as he searches for unique and interesting smells that he aspires to use to make the perfect perfume.
If you're interested in how perfume is made, this book really delves into it, showing a variety of methods used to extract scent and prepare different aromatic items. While I wasn't particularly interested in the manufacture of perfume, I was prepared for a novel rife with olfactory imagery and was met by ideas of scents with no exact description of them. For example, the fact that a smell suggests suspicion is told of while ignoring the use of 'foul' or 'foetid' as I had hoped.
I loved the suggestion of aromas as being subliminally suggestive, with the protagonist's own lack of odour making him unconsciously alien to everybody else, something I believe to be the main strength of the text. The writing style itself was not particularly notable, but the use of perfumer terminology was interesting to read and the French words succeeded in building the atmosphere.
This book is mainly a character study, looking at Grenouille as he develops his ideas, skills, and perpectives culminating in a rather unexpected ending. I'd recommend this to those interested in smell or for anyone who likes crime fiction.